Last week, we hosted the latest MyDrive Hack Days. Hack Days are a way for everyone in the company to get together, break from everyday work and create cool stuff!

Hack Days are very important in the MyDrive culture. They provide a creative outlet for the entire team and give everyone the opportunity to act upon ideas they’ve had for months…but in a really fun way!

2 days, countless lines of code and 9 projects later…we can most definitely say, we all had a blast and learned a lot!

The MyDrive Hack Days actually started the week before when our employees had 5 minutes each to pitch their ideas to the rest of the team. The participants, then had to choose the project they wanted to work on and formed teams.

On the first Hack Day, Mike Hefferan, our Senior Software Engineer, gave us a great “Keynote” which included some really useful tips, the best one being: “Have Fun”.

We’re really happy to say that all 9 projects were finished by the end of Day 2 and ready to be presented to the rest of the team and to our jury!

Car at Night

I’m pretty sure you’re now wondering what we worked on! The following are some examples of our favorite hacks to give you a taste:

The Jury’s favourite

Pooch Patrol: a great pet wearable to give you the location of your pet.

The MyDrive projects

Driver profile comparison: A visual live profile comparison tool which shows the differences between two points of time in a drivers profile history. Written using the MyDrive apis and only javascript, with the help of the libraries jquery, PubSubJS and D3.

Reworking MyDrive realtime dashboards to use a completely serverless architecture with managed AWS services. AWS Lambda functions are triggered on data creation events and pushed to Firehose streams and finally into ElasticSearch where it can be visualised by Kibana. All service infrastructure was configured using Terraform, and Lambdas were written in Apex. The result is a production ready realtime dashboard service.

Ibrush: a smart toothbrush to let kids know when it’s time to brush their teeth.

MyKitchen project

MyKitchen used a Raspberry Pi Camera to scan barcodes on packaged food, and send via an AWS MQTT Topic to DynamoDB as a virtual “Pantry”. A Regressive Data Science algorithm in the backend provides a list of recipe suggestions – based on ingredient completeness – to a mobile app.

MyDarts app

At MyDrive, playing darts is part of the culture and we figured it would be great if we could have a nice looking Darts Scorer app with a leaderboard (to replace our google docs spreadsheet).

Thanks to all of the hackers and we look forward to the next one. If you are interested in being part of our next Hack Day, good news, we’re hiring! Make sure to check out our job page!